Side impact events in vehicles have been identified as one of the top priorities for both research and regulation with government requirements continuing to become more stringent. These additional requirements make designs for door trim systems more challenging because they may impact the door trim at the door armrest supports and at the grab handle. It is known in vehicles to provide an armrest in a door typically having an integrated grab handle to allow the occupant to pull the door shut. According to known arrangements, the door armrest and grab handle are generally anchored to the vehicle door inner panel by a variety of structures. In addition to being anchored to the vehicle door inner panel, the grab handle is also solidly connected to the armrest substrate. This makes the area surrounding the grab handle quite stiff, which may negatively affect occupant injury results.
The known approaches to anchoring the armrest and door grab handle provide a good degree of lateral door function to the vehicle occupant while opening and, particularly, closing the door. Accordingly, a reduction in stiffness of the door trim panel in this area may improve side impact performance. But until now no solution has been available to this problem without compromising armrest and grab handle tensile and vertical strength.
Accordingly, as in so many areas of vehicle technology, there is room in the art of vehicle door design for an alternative configuration to known door armrest and door grab handle and adjacent support structures. The alternate configurations should allow the translation of horizontal force impacting the vehicle door in the event of an impact to vertical movement which deforms or buckles a portion of the armrest substrate to thereby prevent or minimize the movement of the armrest and its associated structure vehicle inward into the passenger area.